Be Dull, Mr President

Kim Phillips-Fein

The night before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president, he made sure that he got a good night’s sleep, carefully instructing his aides not to wake him until 8 a.m. Jimmy Carter, meanwhile, about to step down from office, had been awake for 48 hours, supervising the negotiations over the release of American hostages in Tehran. In the early hours of the morning on Inauguration Day, he called Blair House, where Reagan was sleeping, with exciting news about progress. Mike Deaver, the president-elect’s aide, told Carter it was too soon to wake him. At 8 o’clock, when Deaver finally tried to rouse the new president, telling him it would soon be time to be sworn in, Reagan groaned: ‘Do I have to?’ On the way to the ceremony, he tried to chat with the exhausted Carter, regaling him with tales of his Hollywood days long ago at Warner Bros. ‘He kept talking about Jack Warner,’ Carter later complained. ‘Who’s Jack Warner?’

But once on the podium, Reagan was a master. He stood facing Arlington, reading his own words, written in longhand on a yellow legal pad. His inaugural speech included a story about a Wisconsin boy, Martin Treptow, killed in action in France in 1917, who wrote on the flyleaf of his diary: ‘America must win this war.’ Fact-checkers had found no corroboration of the story: there was no diary, no record of Treptow’s burial in Arlington. No matter. Reagan kept it in, describing the crosses at Arlington, and the young soldier, buried under ‘one such marker’, who had displayed the passionate faith that Reagan hoped would once more unite the nation.

This is a good moment for the appearance of a new history of Reagan’s presidency. His week-long state funeral in 2004 (and its round-the-clock coverage on TV) marked his political canonisation. Among conservatives, it goes without saying that Reagan is the greatest American president of the 20th century: the man who vanquished Soviet Communism abroad and liberal politics at home. The Ronald Reagan Legacy Project is dedicated to naming a landmark after him in each of America’s 3067 counties (the group has also supported campaigns to replace Roosevelt’s image on the dime with Reagan’s). The lineage of many of the most powerful figures in America today – Dick Cheney, George Bush, John Roberts, Samuel Alito – can be traced back through the Reagan administration. Conservatives disaffected with Bush accuse him of the worst sin they can imagine: betraying Reagan’s legacy. Even Democrats have forgotten the harsh feelings they once harboured. After Reagan’s death, John Kerry praised him for ending the Cold War and, in a dig at Bush, for his ability to govern without partisan rancour.

In 1985 Richard Reeves published The Reagan Detour, a book aimed at fellow Democrats who were disheartened by Reagan’s stunning victory in the 1984 election. He assured his readers that Reaganism would be short-lived: Americans still supported Social Security, they still trusted the federal government. Reaganism may have brought the country back from post-Watergate malaise and disillusionment, but liberals would surely be back in power soon. In his new book, however, Reeves acknowledges that the Reagan era changed American political life seemingly for ever, by exalting free enterprise and the market and putting government permanently on the defensive. ‘Amazing things, good and bad, happened in the 1980s,’ he writes, ‘because President Reagan wanted them to happen . . . There is no doubt that he established the Republicans as the country’s governing party.’

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

Letters

Kim Phillips-Fein is wrong about the nature of Ronald Reagan’s 1950s tour of General Electric factories (LRB, 19 October). He wasn’t sent on tour for the purpose of ‘speaking to groups of workers about the dangers of creeping socialism’; he was sent to promote a television show in which he played the host.

I was an employee of the PR firm that represented The General Electric Theater, the half-hour magazine show Reagan presented on the CBS network. Our problem was that everyone knew that Ronnie – as he was universally called in those days – on his own couldn’t draw in the audience needed to keep the show on air every Sunday evening. We came up with the idea that if GE workers could be made to feel pride in the show, they could make up a major core audience. We sent Ronnie out to the GE plants with the message: ‘Live Better Electrically’ and ‘Watch the GE Theater, It’s Your Show.’ I wrote the speech, pleasant and innocuous, a plug for the show and for TV in general (every home should have one) and a call for unity and loyalty to the company. But something odd was happening as the tour proceeded. As he gave the same speech over and over, and the workers happily responded, he began to add some words of his own to my canned speech. Perhaps it was the influence of his new wife, Nancy, maybe it was simply that the enthusiasm of the workers went to his head, but during that tour Ronnie decided he was a star, no longer a featured player. He widened the speech to include some national issues, testing the waters. He went out there a B-list actor and came back a politician.

Eileen Lottman opens her letter in response to my piece about Ronald Reagan by suggesting that Reagan’s speaking tour around General Electric factories was entirely non-political, but ends by saying that he embellished the speech that she wrote for him with remarks that reflected his development as a conservative political thinker (Letters, 16 November). I think she understates the level of political anxiety at GE during the 1950s. Following a major strike at the company in 1946, executives embarked on an elaborate exercise intended to neutralise and weaken the unions and to improve community relations. This included such ideological projects as ‘economics education’ classes for workers on company time, and taking a very hard line in union negotiations. Reagan’s time at GE overlapped with all this, and it is hard to imagine that he was unaffected by the political fear, free-market ideology and anti-unionism in GE at the time.